It pleased her particularly that they were attached by invisible strings to colourful curves of rapidly moving air. How clean and clever that was! You throw up something like a handkerchief, you tether it and by its headlong wish to fly away, you are towed along...Like the kite-surfers in this opening scene, the characters in David Constantine’s fourth collection are often delicately caught in moments of defiance. Disregarding their age, their family, or the prevailing political winds, they show us a way of marking out a space for resistance and taking an honest delight in it. Witness Alphonse – having broken out of an old people’s home, changed his name, and fled the country – now pedalling down the length of the Rhône, despite knowing he has barely six months to live. Or the clergyman who chooses to spend Christmas Eve – and the last few hours in his job – in a frozen, derelict school, dancing a wild jig with a vagrant called Goat. Key to these characters’ defiance is the power of fiction, the act of holding real life at arm’s length and simply telling a story – be it of the future they might claim for themselves, or the imagined lives of others. Like them, Constantine’s bewitching, finely-wrought stories give us permission to escape, they allow us to side-step the inexorable traffic of our lives, and beseech us to take possession of the moment.

    A content moderator for "the world's biggest search engine," who spends her days culling videos of beheadings and suicides, turns from stalking her rapist online to following him in real life. At a camp for recovering internet trolls, a sensitive misfit goes missing. A wounded mother raises the second incarnation of her child.In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these ten stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover our deepest reaches of empathy. This incendiary debut marks the arrival of a perceptive, idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable voice in fiction--one that could only belong to Mary South.

    Throughout the collection, women become insects, men turn to stone, a city becomes insomniac and bodies are picked apart to make up better ones. The mundane worlds of schools and sea side towns are invaded and transformed by the physical, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to the bodies of its inhabitants. Blending the mythic and the fantastic, the collection considers characters in motion – turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new.From the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018, salt slow is an extraordinary collection of short stories that are sure to dazzle and shock.

    Come Up and See Me Sometime is a thought-provoking rant, surprising readers with mirror images of the fears, foibles, and facades of their own lives.

    Parker (Seafire), and many more. Edited by Dhonielle Clayton (The Belles).In the fourth collaboration with We Need Diverse Books, fifteen award-winning and celebrated diverse authors deliver stories about a princess without need of a prince, a monster long misunderstood, memories that vanish with a spell, and voices that refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice. This powerful and inclusive collection contains a universe of wishes for a braver and more beautiful world.AUTHORS INCLUDE: Samira Ahmed, Libba Bray, Dhonielle Clayton, Zoraida Córdova, Tessa Gratton, Kwame Mbalia, Anna-Marie McLemore, Tochi Onyebuchi, Mark Oshiro, Natalie C. Parker, Rebecca Roanhorse, Victoria Schwab, Tara Sim, Nic Stone, and a to-be-announced debut author/short-story contest winner

    Within this collection, each setting is more strange and wonderful than the last, brimming with new technologies and beings. And yet, for all the advances in these futuristic lands, the people still must confront deeply human problems.With tales of friendship and revenge, plus two new stories from the Carve the Mark universe. Each story begins with a hope for a better end, but always end with a better understanding of the beginning.

    In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as "a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways." With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.

    Stacey Tanner flees a stalking psychopathic ex-boyfriend and confronts all of her worst fears in one fateful evening.

    Magpies whisper to lonely drivers late at night. Trees can make wishes come true - provided you know how to wish properly first. Houses creak, fill with water and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A teenager's growing pains are sometimes even bigger than him. And, on a windy beach, a small boy and his grandmother keep despair at bay with an old white door. In these stories, Cornish folklore slips into everyday life. Hopes, regrets and memories are entangled with catfish, wrecker's lamps, standing stones and baying hounds, and relationships wax and wane in the glow of a moonlit sea. This luminous, startling and utterly spellbinding debut collection introduces in Lucy Wood a spectacular new voice in contemporary British fiction. Lucy Wood has a Master's degree in Creative Writing from Exeter University. She grew up in Cornwall. Diving Belles is her first work.

    Little does she know that she is about to be kidnapped.After Georgia escapes into the vast area of British Columbia only known as the Last Frontier, she is forced to make decisions to endure the cold, harsh winter. The unrelenting conditions test not only the strength of her character, but also her will to live.But can she make the right choices to ensure her survival... and that of her unborn child?

    As the perspective shifts among the characters - spanning fifteen years, returning to Israel and then going back again to the Midwest - Osnat tries (and often fails) to belong. Danit Brown gives us an irreverent portrait of a young woman for whom finding a foothold in the world is an obsession, a challenge, and a great adventure.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Inspired by a dark masterpiece. Twenty years into the future, an independent virtual reality developer named Fulton Milner creates a VR program that is so immersive that it truly fools the mind. His program, a virtual resort, created such pleasurable immersion that he is soon recruited by a renown games studio. Here, one of Milner's projects, a virtual fantasy game, catches the eye of some investors and he is finally given the approval he needs to begin the project that would define his career. It's a dark fantasy adventure simulator known only as Project DH. Sam Nagai thought testing videogames would be a dream job until he got saddled with a ton of barely playable mobile games that used very wonky holographic gimmicks. The lack of fun in these games and small pay makes Sam typically reluctant whenever he gets a call for a new gig, but customers for his art commissions have been scarce and Sam needs all the money he can get. He finally gets a call for a new gig with potential bonus pay, but not much else is known about the game itself. From what he does know, it sounds sort of interesting. Virtual reality, dark gothic fantasy world, role playing game mechanics, and uber hard difficulty? Sam's all in for that. After all, even if he gets in over his head, the simulation isn't truly real so there's not really any danger. Join Sam in a virtual sword and sorcery role playing adventure where the main goal is survival at all costs. It's an adventure that's filled with diverse starting classes, customizable combat options, upgradeable weapons and armor, upgradeable statistics, open ended questlines, realistic NPCs with classically trained voice actors, a dark and atmospheric immersive game world, multiplayer content, eye popping creature designs, and so much more. Players say its the perfect blend of simulation and fantasy, where their imaginations can truly run wild. **Note to readers: If any of you are sensitive to swearing, then this book isn't for you. There is copious swearing from the main character, Sam, that's mainly played as a character flaw/trait for laughs and dramatic effect.

    

    Demacia is mourning. And in the eyes of Garen Crownguard, it’s his fault.But can he rise to the challenge when Demacia needs him again?While on a peacetime expedition beyond the borders of Demacia, Garen, Quinn, and the Dauntless Vanguard uncover a plot that threatens to destroy long-standing alliances. As the knight-ranger Quinn tries to get word back to Demacia, Garen and his comrades make a desperate last stand. How long can they last, and at what cost?

    Lost, teetering on the edge of normalcy, Puchner's characters seek to define themselves in a frequently absurd and hostile world -- a world that threatens to make outcasts of us all. Caught up in loneliness or solitude, they can't quite hear the music of their own lives.In "Children of God," a young loner becomes the caretaker and companion for two mentally retarded men, seeking solace in their outsider status. "Essay #3: Leda and the Swan" is told in the forlorn, be-nighted, and tragically funny voice of a high school girl who longs more than anything to be loved. In "Mission," an idealistic ESL teacher is faced with the inscrutable wrath of one of his immigrant students. And in the unsettling "Child's Play," Puchner explores the price of nonconformity by following a pack of boys wreaking havoc on Halloween.Writing from an impressive range of perspectives -- men and women, children and adults, immigrants and tourists -- Puchner deftly exposes the dark, ten-der undersides of his characters with arresting beauty and precision. Here are people fumbling for identity in a depersonalized world, captured in moments that are hilarious, shocking, and transcendent -- sometimes all at once. Unfailingly true, surprisingly moving, and impossible to forget, these nine stories mark the arrival of a brilliant young writer and one of our most promising literary voices.